Lady Merton, Colonist eBook

CHAPTER XIV

A few days later the Gaddesdens were in town, settled
in a house in Portman Square. Philip was increasingly
ill, and moreover shrouded in a bitterness of spirit
which wrung his mother’s heart. She suspected
a new cause for it in the fancy that he had lately
taken for Alice Lucas, the girl in the white chiffon,
who had piped to Mariette in vain. Not that he
ever now wanted to see her. He had passed into
a phase indeed of refusing all society—­except
that of George Anderson. A floor of the Portman
Square house was given up to him. Various treatments
were being tried, and as soon as he was strong enough
his mother was to take him to the South. Meanwhile
his only pleasure seemed to lie in Anderson’s
visits, which however could not be frequent, for the
business of the Conference was heavy, and after the
daily sittings were over, the interviews and correspondence
connected with them took much time.

On these occasions, whether early in the morning before
the business of the day began, or in the hour before
dinner—­sometimes even late at night—­Anderson
after his chat with the invalid would descend from
Philip’s room to the drawing-room below, only
allowing himself a few minutes, and glancing always
with a quickening of the pulse through the shadows
of the large room, to see whether it held two persons
or one. Mrs. Gaddesden was invariably there;
a small, faded woman in trailing lace dresses, who
would sit waiting for him, her embroidery on her knee,
and when he appeared would hurry across the floor to
meet him, dropping silks, scissors, handkerchief on
the way. This dropping of all her incidental
possessions—­a performance repeated night
after night, and followed always by her soft fluttering
apologies—­soon came to be symbolic, in
Anderson’s eyes. She moved on the impulse
of the moment, without thinking what she might scatter
by the way. Yet the impulse was always a loving
impulse—­and the regrets were sincere.

As to the relation to Anderson, Philip was here the
pivot of the situation exactly as he had been in Canada.
Just as his physical weakness, and the demands he
founded upon it had bound the Canadian to their chariot
wheels in the Rockies, so now—­mutatis
mutandis—­in London. Mrs. Gaddesden
before a week was over had become pitifully dependent
upon him, simply because Philip was pleased to desire
his society, and showed a flicker of cheerfulness
whenever he appeared. She was torn indeed between
her memory of Elizabeth’s sobbing, and her hunger
to give Philip the moon out of the sky, should he happen
to want it. Sons must come first, daughters second;
such has been the philosophy of mothers from the beginning.
She feared—­desperately feared—­that
Elizabeth had given her heart away. And as she
agreed with Philip that it would not be a seemly or
tolerable marriage for Elizabeth, she would, in the
natural course of things, both for Elizabeth’s